Nintendo Finally Gives us Switch Rewards…Somewhat

Time to hit those coin blocks

We’ve heard about it for the past month, and we’ve been waiting for it for the past year; with the creation and launch of My Nintendo, the replacement to the once-hallow-then-shallow Club Nintendo, we were given a slew of monthly rotating digital rewards – from mobile phone backgrounds to discounts on Wii U and 3DS games (most of which are games that as an active Nintendo fan you likely already own). Two things have been missing, physical goods (which we likely will never get, time to accept the reality) and rewards on the Nintendo switch.

What was once a locked door, a room in the Princess’ Castle with a star count you could never reach and open, is now upon us. We can now use our gold coins obtained through purchasing digital and physical software as currency on the Switch eShop and Nintendo’s official website.

Pennies for your thoughts, pennies for your games

The result has been…interesting. The conversion rate for coins is one gold coin equals one cent USD (You will have to check with your local Nintendo website to figure out your rates in other countries), meaning at the moment, with my 550 gold coins I can take 5.50 in US money onto my eShop and purchase something with it. The bonus is that you can earn coins from Wii U and 3DS titles as well (just not DLC or any expansions for some reason) meaning your realm of earnings can be vast, however I say this from speaking about play preferences with the Infendo crew for the past year and even the majority of us aren’t playing our buying anything on Wii U anymore…and I personally cannot earn any money from my 3DS purchases due to having a banned NNID, so at least from my viewpoint, I need to buy a lot of Switch titles to make some hefty change. They’d have to be digital, too – getting 5% as opposed to 1% makes a huge difference in the long run.

I like that Nintendo is giving us a rewards program for the Switch. I really do.

I like how, unlike the initial wording was for the American announcement, that this feature doesn’t seem to be dependent on “select titles” (unless Flip Wars is a selected title for some reason…)

I might feel better if we could get quality games given to us every month, like the system in place for the other devices on the website (but with better games). Or if we had been given something fun, like new themes for our consoles or something else. But instead, what we’ve gotten is something that we’ve already had for the past year on the last-gen console and the handheld so swarmed with titles that it’s mind-boggling that Nintendo keeps giving us mundane, highly-owned titles in the monthly rotation.

And from the looks of how the rewards website looks now as compared to the image above, there’s no current plans for anything but discounts. As once spoken by the wise prophet Demi Lovato, Nintendo seems to be responding to fans wonders about different kinds of rewards with “Baby I’m sorry (I’m not sorry).”

The fact that the “Nintendo Switch Rewards” icon has been replaced with the text in the above picture makes it clear to me that, for the time being, if you want any shiny new games for your Switch, it’s going to cost you some doubloons. Deep down however, we all knew it would be this way, didn’t we?

How do you feel about being able to use Gold Coins to purchase Switch software now? Are you a MyNintendo member? Are you using the wrong NNID on your 3DS so you can’t make purchases that affect your status and you can’t change it because that would require you to format your 3DS and lose thousands of dollars worth of data just to save a few cents on games that would lose value faster than it’d take to wipe your system? Okay that last one was just for me, but let us know how you feel about My Nintendo, the rewards and more in our comments down below or on Discord!